Been working on a translation of Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson into Norwegian this morning. Finding that it very necessary to cut some of his flowering language in order to make it flow in the scarcer linguistic style of the Nordic tongue.

Another problem is the other way. When the source text uses a word in a cleverly economical way that says in one word what normally requires several, and there is no such equivalent term in the target language.

Benson for instance called, quite brilliantly, sitting in the smoke of a fire-place as “kippering” oneself. Such verbing of nouns, or using them as adjectives, is common in English, and makes English a wonderfully flexible language, but it s\is often rather problematic to turn that into Norwegian in a straigh forward way.

I had to find a wording that ended up being something along the line of “turning oneself into a smoked herring”, which is not as snappy and economical, but I felt the image was worth retaining.